


cast upon the waters

by Morbane



Category: Magids Series - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Constructive Criticism Welcome, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Sirens, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-18 08:59:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2342669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick gets involved in Blest's magic again sooner than he expects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cast upon the waters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NightsMistress](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/gifts).



By the time I got home to Bristol it was the school term. Maxwell Hyde took me back and caught Dad up a bit over coffee, which was nice of him, and which also made Dad more amenable to getting started on running around after school supplies. I sort of blathered to my friends that I had been away with relatives and talked up Toby and Grundo and the Izzies as imaginary younger cousins. Who knows, if things go well with Roddy, one day I might end up related to some of them.

I couldn't see what the things I was learning in school had anything to do with what I wanted to do, but for a while I was diligent about them anyway, because I was trying to be good, and because I'd spent a month thinking - and writing - about Blest, and things spiralling out of control, and I didn't want to think about that for a while. Then I went right back to wishing school was over with and I could be learning from Romanov instead.

About that time Maree and Rupert invited me to stay with them for a weekend in Weavers End. Both of them are Magids and they have postings all over the multiverse, but Weavers End is their home. I was glad to see them. Maree is one of my favourite people in the world, and I wanted to ask about Rob, who is the heir to the Koryfonic Empire as well as _actually_ my cousin. 

Because they are Magids, they also knew about the situation in Blest, and so they didn't ask me very much about things like raising the dragon and the Prayermasters and their xanadu. Instead I told them all about Mini, and the goat, which was good for a few laughs, and Rupert told me how the Koryfonic Empire was getting on. The person who's Emperor now, whom Rob is heir to, was Rupert's neighbour once. It's a small multiverse.

I'm in a weird position with the Magids, because I know a lot of them, and I entered into one of their Deep Secrets, called Babylon. I maybe even know more about it than they do. But Magids are supposed to keep quiet about certain things, especially on Earth, which is a Naywards world. So Rupert and Maree were being quite kind in talking about their work, but every so often they would look at each other to sort of check whether the other person thought they were being discreet on this or that topic. It was strange to see Maree check herself that way, because she isn't that sort of person, and a strange to see Rupert do it too, because he's been a Magid for years and years and Maree's just starting out, but it was nice too.

Then Rupert said, "and of course, because Blest used to be Ayewards..."

I said, trying to sound like I knew, I guess, "I thought it was neutral, because it balanced magic for so many worlds." We tore Blest from its place in the multiverse, Roddy and I, and sent it spinning away.

Both Maree and Rupert winced, and to pretend I hadn't noticed, I said, "But I suppose it would have to be Ayewards, because of how easy it used to be to practice magic there. And now it's Naywards?"

"That's right," Rupert said, and I could see he was about to change the topic.

When I thought about it later, all I could decide was that the balance of magic must mean a different axis from Aye or Nay, but that just made balance _and_ Ayewards and Naywards make less sense.

But meanwhile, I took advantage of the way they didn't want to talk about that to ask for ideas about how to practice magic while I was still on Earth.

I also talked a bit about Roddy that weekend. I couldn't help it. I didn't want to, much, because Maree is _sharp_ and I thought she'd say something amused, a bit like Janine would have - even though Maree's not Janine in any way. I don't know. But I couldn't talk about Blest without Roddy.

If Rupert wouldn't tell me about Blest and balance, Roddy probably could. She had gone away to study to be Lady of Governance just as Maxwell Hyde had taken me home to Bristol, and I expected her schooling was going better than mine.

But I didn't expect I'd have any chance to talk to her again soon.

Maybe that kind of thought came out in what I said more than I meant it to, or maybe it was a thought Rupert picked out of the air - Maree says that a certain level of telepathy is common among Magids, and probably in Rupert's family - whether he meant to or not. Anyway, a week after that visit, Maree phoned me up and asked me if I wanted to go to Blest for the autumn half term.

"Just for the week?" I asked. I didn't want to sound too eager.

"Mmm," Maree said, "we might be able to stretch it, time-wise. Would a month be all right?"

"Thanks, Maree," I said, and I really meant it. I was going mad in Bristol.

It wasn't exactly a holiday. Maree and Rupert had pulled Magid strings to allow me to tag along with some of the Blest court wizards in their work. Specifically, Daniel Hyde, who is Roddy's father, was out in the Irish Sea leading what sounded to me like an oceanographic survey. I got delivered to Black-pearl (not actually near Blackpool) in the dark, and then a couple of men with a fishing boat picked me up and took me to where the science fleet was as the sun rose.

They have a different kind of sail boat in Blest - the wind is caught by a sail, but then it goes into something like a gramophone horn, and a set of twisty pipes. It uses magic, too, but not very much; the special way it works is that it can pick up the wind's force from _any_ direction and turn it into propulsion going any _other_ direction you please. So their ships don't tack with the wind, though they're still becalmed the same as ours. And of course they have motors on their ships, though they mostly didn't use them.

The first day I was on the _Chorus_ , which was the larger of the two ships, Daniel gave me a sort of cataloguing bit and then his assistant Mick ran around explaining all of the workings of the ship to me. Then it rained. The sky just opened and Mick co-opted me into stretching out awnings and driving pumps. He taught me the first bit of magic I learned then, which was a drying spell. I got used to puffing it out towards fittings and towels and things, like a hopeful breath. I learned to make it good enough for _that_ moment, but it never lasted long.

The second piece of magic I learned was a sound-dampening spell - "to keep away the snoring later", Mick said.

All the magic I learned was like that - simple tricks. That was fine by me. Before last summer I hadn't been able to call fire. It really was more like science than sorcery on the _Chorus_. I'd thought that Daniel was some kind of important weather wizard, because Roddy had told me about how they used to travel with the Court and that was what he did, but he didn't use many tools for his magic and in fact I never saw him do a large working. He explained to me the theory behind moving pressure systems about, but he hedged it with a lot of "usually" and "this used to..."s. I think I would have thought it was a lot of puffery, but it was clear that Daniel Hyde was the kind of person who liked explaining things to people, and he didn't like having to use maybes to me.

One of the tools he used most often was maps. He explained to me that you needed to know details about the land in in order to move air around above it. This project he - and other weather wizards, all pretty high-up - was on was the same thing for the Irish Sea except that as well as taking depth and temperature measurements and so on he was doing something to measure magic as well. "Not sure if we'll be much good without it," he said once, smiling. I had no idea if he was joking. He said that this survey was the kind of thing they were supposed to do every decade - maintaining knowledge the way the Merlin maintained the land, though I thought of it as maintaining knowledge in a very ordinary way - but the change of magics had pushed it forward.

I felt bad about the change in magics. I probably looked it. He looked at me and said, "And of course, there was the business with the salamanders."

"Oh?" I said. I'd thought Maxwell Hyde had made that his business.

"Fire elementals," Daniel Hyde explained, "harmless though they are in small groups, put out the balance for the water elementals in the region. That's why our more powerful water elementals have gone farther off shore for the time being. Too long and hot and magical a summer on land."

One of the things we did was put down a net that fell like a grid - we towed it behind the ship, unreeling it over the stern, and it had spells on it to make it drape nicely and settle on on the sea floor without bunching up. It took an impression of contours and ocean fauna. Then after a pause we hauled it up again, and Daniel and the others pored over it and the impression, which they could see and I couldn't. One day we let down the net, pulled it up again and scraped it off off weed and sand (my job), sailed on for twenty minutes, and put it down again, again and again. We went straight for about twenty miles - as far as I can tell; they prefer leagues in Blest - and then zig zagged north, and then went south again. "Why?" I said irritably. Carroll, who was quite informative in a laconic way, said "Sirens." 

"Oh," I said. Of course that was in the first week, before Daniel mentioned about the fire elementals, and I didn't put two and two together then.

Three weeks after I'd been delivered at Black-pearl, there was a storm.

Daniel and Mick were in conference on deck in the early morning - well, at the point when my eyes agreed to cooperate and open to more than mere slits - and they kept coming back to talk to each other in the same spot, like figures in a fancy clock marking the hour. They argued some of those times, but not all. Mick won the last argument, and we went out in one of the _Chorus_ 's dinghies to trail a rope with spaced inflatables along it on the surface of the water. I was cautiously excited because this was the start of a real working - testing a spot for its amenability to a structure that they might one day put down. (Yes, you can tell how much I was starved for something that wasn't measurements that even that kind of future-proofing felt good to me.)

From the moment we stepped onto the dinghy the sky darkened and the wind picked up, as if it knew. Daniel just shrugged at it, maybe because he'd always been able to before - but maybe that's uncharitable; anyway, he both did and didn't see it coming. We got out to where I could only see the _Chorus_ 's main sail as a dim flash - the material they make their sails of is kind of plasticky, and reflective - and then I realised we were going to have a problem because the waves in between us were starting to rock high enough that the Chorus occasionally dipped out of sight. 

Underneath the wind, there was a murmuring.

Daniel didn't panic at all, and Carroll only started to get reckless. I think, knowing where it came from, that the murmuring dulled something in them. All I know is that one moment Daniel was smiling and the next moment the sky was was dark and a wave came out of nowhere and smashed the dinghy over.

They were still with the hull, but I was flung away from it almost immediately and no matter how I tried the further away it seemed to get. I thought I saw them clinging. I tried to call out to them, but they didn't call back; when I think on it now it feels eerie, they way it _should_ have felt when I was there, but of course, when I was there, I was too busy kicking past waterlogged folds of of clothing and trying not to gulp water.

When I did go underwater, I heard singing.

I followed it. It wanted me to follow it, and I knew that perfectly well, and I knew it might not want me to go for any good reason, but quite quickly I was so tired that I realised I was going to need the song's pull to get anywhere at all. So I let it pull me. I thrashed mechanically through the water, my eyes squeezed shut most of the time - I had this thought that you're supposed to kick of your shoes and all that when you fall into water clothed, but I had this irrational fear that I was going to get cold. Colder than I already was, I mean. And get numb and lose feeling in my feet and arms... I couldn't hear anything over the singing and I could barely see most of the time and the idea of shrinking my world even further was terrifying.

The song had a horrible quality like praise to it. It wanted me to know how proud of me it was that I was swimming on. I wanted it to shove off.

I think I saw my panther swimming for a while beside me. I looked it up later: panthers can swim very well. It's possible. But it was only for a while, and when I think on it now it's exactly the same as a dream. At the time, though I was reassured. It would have been just like that panther to give me a sign by swimming in the opposite direction.

The song told me I was about to come to land, and in a while when I reached my arm out for another stroke I hit rock. I stopped and grabbed it, or tried to - momentum and a wave carried me so I hit my head on it as well. I just stopped for a moment, and then I flipped onto my back and tried to un-glue my eyes, and then I just doggy paddled the rest of the way to the outcropping, though it was mostly the waves taking me there.

It was a rock rather than an island proper. Perhaps that's why Daniel hadn't planned for it, or perhaps he'd been lulled by the wind-murmuring too early in the day. There was a scrambling way up, and a space on the top with jagged bits and tufts of grass, barely twenty yards across - they looked slight and airy, but the wind wasn't shifting them - and huddled like a group of puffins were the sirens, singing.

They looked rather like women at first, but then you saw their faces and the way their noses curved down and didn't really stop - the bottoms of their beaks came from their chins. They had sleek, slick heads too, covered in tiny glossy feathers and ragged a little at their necks, like some kind of gelled-down hairdo. 

They didn't take too much notice of me a first. They looked at me, in pairs and threes, and then more would look, and then they'd lose interest and look away. I was quite dazed. The wind was dying down, but I was soaked, and very cold, and I had nothing else on me. Every now and then it occurred to me that I should stamp my feet or do something, but then my mind would go vaguely off again. Suddenly the drying spells occurred to me and I started puffing them out from my skin. Little bursts of warmth. It wasn't much, but it was something.

That released me from my torpor and I started to look at the sirens more closely. They were corporeal, though there was a mistiness to their edges that i felt uncertain about.

They were still huddled at the east end of the rock, away from the central tussocks, so I took a step or two forward to see what occupied them.

At that, half of them mobbed me. They pecked at me - or tried to, I put up a shield - and pawed at me with their gnarled hands. They weren't hard touches, some were even caresses, but they were horribly acquisitive. It felt as though they were trying to take something. It was, or so it seemed to me, halfway between a gauntlet and an orgy.

I kept up my shields and I planted my feet, and they started to lose interest again, and wheeled back to their first huddle.

After my first moment on the rock, I think I got it into my frozen head that standing was bad, moving was good. So I stepped forward again towards them, heading toward the huddle. It wasn't conscious. At that, the whole group broke away from what they were doing and swirled around me, and then I saw that they had another man.

What they had done to him was horrible. He was only ragged and wind-battered - physically. But one of the sirens darted back towards him and tore into his arm with her beak. He made a horrible sound, and swayed a little, and came right. The arm was still there, bloodless. But I could see a gap in his essence. She'd gone straight past the flesh and pulled out life essence. It was as if they were treating the man's flesh as a convenient husk to eat seeds out of. Most of him wasn't there.

"No," I said, and for the third time on that rock, I felt as though I woke up. The wind was quite gone.

There was something strange then. I was angry, and I started to realise I could do something with that anger, and almost at once, the things I realised seemed to come from beyond any thoughts I'd had previously. It came to me that I had an immense deal of power in this place and time - more than Daniel, for example, would ever have, because he was used to working in an Ayewards world and it had turned Nay - and that was not because of my own magical talent, but because of the salamanders. The sirens were elementals of a kind, and the salamanders were elementals that were opposed to them. Last summer, I had been used as the start of a sacrifice, and instead of my death being used to change worlds the way Sybil and Japheth had wanted, the deaths of the salamanders had gone into _me_. The power of those sacrifices was yet to be used.

There was another thing that came to me, a certainty I had no reason for: I learned that these sirens had, not so very long ago, been selkies. It was just a change that had been made when we raised the dragon. They hadn't been the kind of thing that ate human essences before.

I think I was supposed to make another change - turn the sirens back into selkies, which would have been hard, or turn the sirens onwards, like turning a dial another ninety degrees, into something kinder. Vegetarian.

I didn't do any of that. What I did was step forward and pick up the man the sirens were eating and walk straight out onto the water.

Walking on water in Blest is really not that different to walking across the shreds of the multiverse - finding the point in an atom that is more than space and jumping from such to such. I've gone multiverse-hopping several times, although not always exactly under my own steam, and I had the mad thought that if I applied the concept here, the worst that could happen was going down into water. When I didn't, and the idea worked, I just kept going.

The man was horribly light. He didn't say anything. He curled his fingers into his palms.

I went towards where I thought the dinghy was. When I got there, Carroll and Daniel were still clinging on. I wasn't actually sure how to help them out, because if I tried to stop I thought I'd slide down between atoms, but as I approached Daniel yelled, "Stand by," and threw a kind of rope to me. Well, more like a trace. It had no pull to it. But it looped around my shoulders easily enough.

I strode on towards the _Chorus_. When I got there I was no use at all. I huddled in a corner with the siren's man while everyone else bustled about setting course for the end of the trace.

They set back to shore anyway to get help for the siren's man. His name was Armand. I think we were all surprised he still knew that. I don't know what will happen to him now. I don't know if souls grow back once they've been chewed and clawed into; if the edges still hurt. I think he's in a kind of permanent shock.

They put me ashore, too. Partly it was to go and get help for Armand, because I'd carried him off and I insisted, and also I'd had enough. 

So I rounded off the month Maree had promised me having cups of tea and prettybread with Roddy in Mrs Candace's parlour.

I said, "Well, I told your Dad one useful thing."

"What was that?" Roddy asked seriously. She holds her teacup so nicely. You'd think I was having a visit with the Queen. 

"Sirens aren't water elementals," I said. "Or not just. They're sort of air as well."

"Ah," said Roddy. We both sat and thought about that for a bit. 

"It might help," I said. I almost immediately didn't want to talk about the sirens - I had such a _lot_ of things I didn't want to talk about! - so I tried to segue off with a soft of lofty look over Roddy's shoulder into the garden.

Roddy laughed. "You don't need to say that," she said. "You rescued my Dad." As she said that, she seemed to realise it was true, and went bright pink.

"Ah," I said, feeling very bitter. "Tick-box heroism."

I couldn't help thinking about other people before Armand and other people after him. I could have stopped that. I could have turned the sirens into sea anemones or otters or rainbows. 

And maybe I might have if I hadn't been so cold and dazed and hadn't felt such a great big _push_ to do it. First a pull to get me on the island, then a push to get the sirens off it. The universe wasn't subtle.

Rupert and Maree talk about it sometimes - how you know something big is _right_ to do. And now that I'd been in their shoes I couldn't think of anything worse. 

Maybe this was why their Upper Room didn't want me for a Magid.

"So what does a Lady of Governance do?" I asked.

Roddy said, "Come along after the fact and fix things, mostly." 

She said it with a wry smile so I would know she didn't mean she was trying to fix _me_. Not that Roddy would, I think. Even that was the joke.

"It's not so bad, I think," she said, "that Blest is no longer the anchor of magic for so many worlds."

"Those other worlds aren't doing so well, I thought," I said. I hardly dared to say it.

"No, they're not," Roddy said calmly. "But think of the Prayermasters. They didn't control their magic - we did. I don't know how good that was."

"Hm," I said. "They had a long time to twist their ideas of Blest."

"We had a long time too," Roddy said, a bit obscurely.

I gave her a puzzled look and she gave me a raised eyebrow back. Then she shrugged. She was practicing Lady-of-Governance-ing on me, I realised. Not the fixing part, but the ineffability.

"No one likes to be dragged kicking and screaming towards the greater good," I tried, meaning Loggia and also me.

There was a place for Naywards worlds.


End file.
